About
Rudy Iván Pradenas is a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Leiden University (Netherlands) and Universidad Diego Portales (Chile). His research lies at the intersection of Latin American literary and visual studies, colonial and postcolonial theory, and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the material and cultural technologies through which power, subjectivity, and space are historically produced.
At the University of Michigan, his current doctoral research, Pacificación y tecnogénesis del sujeto colonial: imágenes, escrituras y espacios de poder en la modernidad temprana de América Latina, examines how colonial forms of subjectivity were produced through the convergence of writing, visual culture, and urban space. Rather than approaching colonial domination solely through juridical or military frameworks, the project analyzes the material and aesthetic technologies—legal texts, religious imagery, chronicles, and urban infrastructures—through which racialized and gendered subjects were formed, governed, and rendered legible within colonial society. By tracing how these technologies structured everyday life and embodied experience, the dissertation offers a cultural and historical account of subject formation in the early modern Hispanic world.
Pradenas is the author of Políticas del anonimato en el cine de América Latina (Editorial Macul, 2024), a monograph that examines anonymity as a political and aesthetic figure in Latin American cinema, and co-author of Estéticas de la posdemocracia (Editorial Escaparate, 2022), which analyzes contemporary art and state violence in postdictatorial Chile. In addition, he has co-edited several volumes on Latin American politics, performance, and visual culture, including Del consenso a la posdemocracia en Chile (Grapho Ediciones, 2024).
His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as A Contracorriente: Revista de estudios latinoamericanos, Mutatis Mutandis: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Dorsal: Revista de Estudios Foucaulteanos, and La Fuga: Revista de Cine, addressing topics including colonial violence, cinema and governmentality, migration, and visual regimes. Alongside his research, he has taught courses on Latin American cinema, literature, and culture, and is actively involved in interdisciplinary research networks in the Americas and Europe.
